Research

I am experiencing a crisis of what I know and responding to it by researching new forms of expression. In 2015, when I shifted from visual arts and installation to performance, I had a similar experience. I had a vision of myself crochetting my ancestors’ rifle. I didn’t immediately recognise it as a form of art. I eventually understood it was the new artistic language I had been longing for. I stepped into the complex multidimensionality of space. I dealt with the bewildering endless possibilities of the world as my canvas and my body as my tools. I created “The End of an Era”, my first performance.

In rethinking my work, I see that both performances (“The End of an Era” and “The Unbearable Contradiction”) are pictorial and slightly narrative. I create a canvas with my body, a picture perfectly composed despite happening out there in the everchanging and unpredictable world.

I am now searching for something else. An evocative, poetic language. I don’t know what form it will take and which materials I will use. It could be my body – it’s constantly with me. It allows to not impact our polluted world. I appreciate huge contemporary artworks one can almost enter – thus entering the artists’ internal world (these days I’m studying Matthew Barney, Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher). But I don’t have a vast studio or economic resources, and I want to be delicate towards the over-stuffed world we inhabit.

I am reflecting on the content I want to communicate. “The End of an Era” was the rejection of violence through transformation. “The Unbearable Contradiction” was the rejection of violence through expression, healing and purification (the hemp seeds). In a way, violence was still the protagonist.

But we overcome violence when we don’t think about it anymore. When we propose something completely new and original. Perhaps an ideal of how humans could be and live. What is a human being, really?

In responding to violent circumstances, humans go from being victims to being survivors, and that’s a fundamental step in the process. “Victim” and “survivor” are specific identities. I now see I have been stuck in the survivor identity. What comes after?

Something completely new, I have yet to discover.

To make new art I have to become a new person, that’s how my creative process works.